


now we're lost somewhere in outer space

by dorothymcshane



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-11
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-08 20:51:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4320228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorothymcshane/pseuds/dorothymcshane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“We shouldn’t be here,” the Doctor tells Clara, but Clara doesn’t hear him, doesn’t hear his words about sunflowers and weeping angels, doesn’t hear his words about how all of time and space will collapse. She’s far too enchanted by the librarian.</p>
            </blockquote>





	now we're lost somewhere in outer space

Her hair is red, shimmering in the sunlight that finds its way in through the windows in the library. As soon as the Doctor spots her, he turns around, cursing under his breath.

   “We shouldn’t be here,” he tells Clara, but Clara doesn’t hear him, doesn’t hear his words about sunflowers and weeping angels, doesn’t hear his words about how all of time and space will collapse. She’s far too enchanted by the librarian, the freckles that speckle her skin and the way she throws her head backwards as she laughs, talking to someone about Oscar Wilde.

   “It’s Amelia Pond,” Clara breathes, suddenly remembering where she’s seen the face of the woman before, smiling at her from the author biographies at the back of the books she’s taught her students about.

   “She prefers Amy,” the Doctor says, stealing Clara’s attention.

   “You _know_ her?”

   He shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. What are we doing in a library, anyway, when we have the entire universe at our feet? We could be dining with Cleopatra. On a spaceship! There’s a marketplace where they sell dreams …”

   “I just want to say hello to her,” Clara says.

   “None of her books have been published, yet. You can’t tell her anything about the future.” He pauses to take a breath, and there’s something absent-minded in his tone when he continues. “Too dangerous.”

   Clara rolls her eyes at him. “Don’t treat me like an amateur.”

   “I can’t bribe you with cocktails on the moon, can I?” he says. “After all, we never got around to that.”

   “Two minutes,” Clara promises him.

   “I’ll be in the TARDIS,” he says, before disappearing towards the doors of the library, leaving Clara alone between the bookshelves. She feels a shiver run down her spine when she realises that she has absolutely no idea of what to say to this woman, who in the future will be one of the world’s most well-known authors, who now is so breathtakingly beautiful that her mere presence seems to light up the entire library.

   “I’m looking for something to read,” she finally settles on, ignoring the way her heart skips a beat when Amelia reaches up on her tiptoes to place a book at the top shelf of the bookshelf in front of her. Her porcelain-pale legs seem to go on forever.

   “Oh?” Amelia says, turning around to face Clara, a smile on her lips. “Any particular genre?” Her accent’s Scottish, and she’s obviously not been spending enough time in New York for it to have been influenced by the way the people around them speak, yet.

   “Science fiction,” Clara finds herself saying, thinking about trains in space and cocktails on the moon. “Are there any books about ... adventures? In time and space?”

   Something in Amy’s eyes flickers, and then she looks away, nodding towards another part of the library. “I don’t read science fiction, so I’m afraid I can’t really recommend you anything, but you can find our science fiction department over there.”

   “And do you drink coffee?” Clara asks her, feeling her cheeks blush.

   Amelia raises an eyebrow, but she looks amused. “Coffee ...”

   “That hot, black drink made of coffee beans,” Clara says, without having any idea of what the hell she’s rambling about. “You can drink it with milk, if you want to, or with sugar. I have this friend who always puts fifteen sugar cubes in his coffee cups.”

   “Yeah,” Amelia says, “I’d like that. Not fifteen sugar cubes. But coffee.” She casts a glance at the book trolley next to her. “My work shift ends at six o’clock. Can you wait until then?”

   “Sounds great,” Clara says, a smile spreading across her lips. “See you, then ...”

   “Amy,” she says, smiling back at Clara. “Amy Pond.”

 

 

“You’re having coffee with Amy Pond?” the Doctor shouts. He’s hanging upside down in the room below the TARDIS console, fixing some cords or something equally boring.

   “Yep,” Clara shouts back, swinging her legs back and forth through the air where she’s sitting on the console, pressing buttons and pulling levers when the Doctor asks her to. The TARDIS has broken down, refusing to let them leave New York, and the Doctor thinks there’s something wrong with it, but Clara’s pretty sure the machine simply understands how important this is to her.

   “Well,” the Doctor says after a long moment of silence, walking up the stairs to the console room, “don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

   “No hanky panky in the TARDIS,” Clara agrees, a corner of her mouth curved upwards.

   The Doctor sinks down next to her, fiddling with the ring he wears on one of his fingers. “Just ... be careful.”

   “Like you are, Mr Constantly Rushing into Danger?”

   “You know what I mean.”

   “You travelled with her, didn’t you?” Clara says, turning her head to look at him.

   The sadness in his eyes is palpable. “For a long time.”

   Clara can sense his aversion to talking about it, but she needs to know. “Why did you stop?”

   He rises from the console to take a few steps back and forth over the floor before he finally opens his mouth again. “Because she died.”

   “I just _saw_ her,” Clara says. “I’m having coffee for her this evening, for god’s sake.”

   “She was sent back in time by the weeping angels,” he says, his back turned towards Clara, his voice frail, “and I can’t see her again, not ever, unless I want to be the cause behind the deaths of millions of people.”

   Clara closes the distance between the two of them to place her arms around him, holding him as he collects himself. “I’m sorry.”

   “She’s magnificent,” he tells her. “Mad, impossible, but magnificent.”

   _I know_ , Clara thinks.

 

 

“So, what’s brought you to New York?” Amy asks Clara. They’re sitting in a small, cosy café a couple of blocks away from the library, drinking coffee and sharing an enormous chocolate chip cookie with each other.

   Clara considers the question for a moment before settling on an answer. “Adventure.”

   “The war wasn’t adventure enough for you?”

   Amy’s words remind Clara of that it’s 1942, that the world is being torn apart by war, but it’s hard to believe, sitting in the café, a calm hanging in the air around the two of them.

   “The war’s not an adventure,” Clara says. “Adventure’s about discovering, not about destroying.”

   Amy tilts her head to a side, regarding Clara with an almost unsettling intensity in her eyes. “And what have you discovered?”

   “That every time I think the world can’t get more extraordinary, it surprises me.”

   Amy takes a moment to reflect upon Clara’s words before she nods.

   “I used to be an English teacher,” Clara admits. “I loved it, but ... it’s not the same as travelling, is it?”

   “Nothing is,” Amy agrees.

   “Do you miss it?” Clara asks her, realising her mistake a second too late.

   “Huh?”

   “Travelling,” Clara says, doing her best to salvage the damage. “You said ‘nothing is’, and you’re Scottish and here in New York, so I take it that there’s a story behind how you ended up here, too.”

   Amy laughs, but the sound is devoid of humour. “Oh, trust me, there’s a story.”

   Clara leans her elbows against the table, placing her chin in her hands. “Tell me about how it began.”

   “I was supposed to be getting married,” Amy says, the look in her eyes far-away.

   “Did you?” Clara says, glancing down at Amy’s hands. She isn’t wearing a ring. “Get married?”

   “No,” she confirms. “Figured I’d rather see the world.”

   “Do you regret it?”

   “I regret that I didn’t tell him goodbye,” Amy says, and perhaps it isn’t the answer to Clara’s question, but Clara understands. “So, you didn’t tell me your name.”

   “Clara Oswald,” Clara says, vaguely embarrassed by that she’s taken for granted that Amy knows her name, since _she_ ’s known Amy’s name her entire life.

   “Clara Oswald,” Amy echoes. “I once met someone called Oswin Oswald. She saved my life.”

   Clara stares at Amy, trying to take in her words. Logically she knows that there must be echoes of her, somewhere out there, but it would drive her insane if she stopped to think about it, so she doesn’t.

   “You okay?” Amy asks her, waving a hand in front of her eyes.

   “Yeah,” Clara says, reaching for her coffee cup to take a sip from it. “Yeah, I’m fine. For how long have you worked at the library?”

   “For three years now.”

   “Do you like it?”

   “Well,” Amy says, “like I said, it’s not the same as travelling.” She hesitates for a second before continuing. “I’d like to become an author, someday.”

   Clara’s face breaks into a smile. “Yeah?”

   “I used to write articles, but I can’t seem to get used to writing on ty ... uh, never mind.”

   “I’d love to read something by you, someday.”

   “Don’t get your hopes up,” Amy warns her, but she’s smiling, too. “It probably won’t happen. It’s just one of those stupid dreams everyone’s got. ‘Become a rock star’ or ‘become an astronaut’, you know.”

   “Still,” Clara says.

   “What do you dream about?” Amy asks her.

   Clara wonders if the question should be easy to reply to. It isn’t, and she has no idea of what she dreams about. “Someone who would understand,” she finally says, and maybe that’s exactly why she’s so intrigued by Amy, because it feels like she would.

   “Yeah,” Amy says, looking down at the table.

   “I used to miss home,” Clara says, “but even if I’d return now, there’s nothing for me there, anymore. I guess that should make me feel sad, shouldn’t it?”

   “Does it?”

   “No,” Clara admits. “It just makes me feel free. Like I don’t have anything to lose, anymore.”

   “I suppose I get what you’re saying,” Amy says. “When I first came here, I spent most of my time being terrified, since I didn’t know anyone, have any money or anywhere to stay, but there were moments when it felt like ... anything was possible, you know? I could create a whole new life for myself.”

   Clara just regards her over the table, feeling shivers run down her spine. She reminds her of a being from a fairy tale, only she’s real, sitting in front of Clara, sipping her coffee. Clara wants to ask her about the Doctor, about who he used to be, about planets Amy’s travelled to, about falling in love with the universe. She wants to ask her about how she’s handling having to attempt to live a normal life after having had all of time and space at her feet, once upon a time. She wants to know if that’s possible.

 

 

Amy’s flat is shoebox-sized and barely looks lived in, but she grabs a bottle of red wine, dangles a key in front of Clara’s eyes and then leads her up the stairs in the building until they reach the rooftop. The view over the city from there is absolutely breathtaking, the sky behind it painted in shades of orange and purple, and Clara has a feeling of that it will be even more magical as it gets darker.

   “Yeah,” Amy says, smiling at the way Clara’s looking out over the city, “the flat’s rubbish, but it’s worth the rent for this alone.” She sinks down onto one of the chairs on the rooftop, fumbling with the cork to the bottle.

   “It’s amazing,” Clara says, turning her full attention back to Amy.

   She finally manages to open the bottle of wine and tilts her head back to take a swig from it before reaching it to Clara. Clara grabs it and then sits down on the chair next to hers. She thinks about how she chose this over cocktails on the moon, and she thinks about how she made the right choice. The cocktails will be waiting for her, but _this_ , this isn’t something that you can postpone indefinitely, this is a fixed point in time, this is something that only could happen right here and right now, and it’s heartbreakingly, achingly perfect.

   “Sometimes I wish this city wasn’t so easy to fall in love with,” Amy says, a tone of longing in her voice. “It would be easier to hate it, knowing that I’m stuck here and all. But I don’t. I could never hate it.”

   In that moment it’s easy for Clara to understand what Amy means.

   “Do you ever think about how strange it is that you’re surrounded by people all the time in cities like this one, but don’t _know_ any of them?” Amy continues, taking another gulp of the wine as Clara reaches her the bottle. “Like, they all have their own stories to tell, and you won’t hear most of them. It just makes me feel so fucking lonely, sometimes.”

   “All the time,” Clara admits.

   “I like that you asked me to have coffee with you,” Amy says, her gaze focused on the skyline.

   Clara laughs. “You didn’t think I was creepy, then, hitting on you while you were at work?”

   “Well, if you’d been some middle-aged guy sounding way too self-assured, then I’d definitely have flipped you off, but I could tell that it isn’t what you normally do, and you’re cute, so.” Clara hides her face in her hands, and this time, Amy’s the one laughing. “Just being honest.”

   Clara looks back up at her, watching her in silence for a few second before she opens her mouth again. “I like your hair.”

   “Everyone does,” Amy says, but Clara’s pretty sure they both know that Clara wasn’t really talking about her hair, and when Amy strokes a fingertip over Clara’s lower lip, Clara struggles to remember how to breathe.

   The first kiss is tentative, their lips barely touching, Clara holding the bottle of wine in a hand.

   “Put that down,” Amy mumbles, a smile on her lips as she brushes a fingertip against Clara’s arm.

   Clara does as she is told, and somewhere in the world, there’s a war going on, and someone’s getting their heart broken, and someone is saying goodbye to the love of their life without knowing if they’re ever going to see them again, and maybe Clara should care about all of that, but she can’t really find any reasons to, not with Amy’s lips pressed against hers, coffee and red wine in her bloodstream, and the city of New York glittering around them in the darkness.


End file.
